War World Discovery

by John F. Carr

  “Which is?”

  “Rob the huts while the people are out at work. He’s got to have noticed that our people have food they keep there.”

  “Ah hell, we’ll have to post our own guards.”

  “Wouldn’t be a bad idea generally.”

  “But who the hell can we spare from the real jobs? …The kids, maybe? Lemme think.…”

  “Well, I’ve got to get some rest.”

  Bronstein got up, leaving Jablonski still pondering, glanced automatically around the main tent to check on who was still there, then went out.

  The radio in the guard shack was pontificating about comparative risk-factors and interest-rates of proposed pension-fund investment plans.

  The chill wind caught Bronstein with a brief gust, making him shiver. He’d grown used to Haven’s ever-shifting interplay of orange and blue light, but he didn’t think he’d ever get used to the cold. The only way to keep warm was to wear layers and layers of clothing or else hang around the heating-units, and those wouldn’t last forever. He’d spread the custom of turning off the heaters while people were out of their huts so as to save their batteries, but that made for a cold homecoming and would only put off the inevitable. The miners would need fireplaces, and that meant firewood, which meant a sawmill of some sort.

  That was when he came up to his hut’s door and noticed that something had changed.

  He stopped for a moment, trying to think what the difference was. Something about the plastic-slab door, some detail…It didn’t fit the frame exactly the way he’d left it. Very cautiously, Bronstein pulled off one of his gloves and felt the door.

  It was warm.

  Bronstein drew the obvious conclusions, then turned and hurried back to the main tent. He nearly ran into Mama Yolanda the Mouth coming out, and she started her usual hoot of: “Whatchu think you doin’?”

  She’ll do, was his first thought. He clutched her shoulders, making her actually shut up in surprise. “Shh!” he whispered fiercely. “Hassan’s hiding out in my hut. I need some witnesses, and some muscle. Let’s get—”

  She didn’t let him finish. A huge and ugly grin split her face. “You doan’ need nobody but me, organizer man,” she pronounced, shoving him aside. She reached for something inside her layers of rough-sewn coats and marched past him toward the rows of huts. Bronstein couldn’t think of anything better than to run after her, quietly cursing himself for not having brought any kind of weapon. She got to the hut before he did, and without a pause she yanked the door open.

  Sure enough, it was Hassan who jumped out, screeching something unintelligible, hands reaching for Mama Yolanda’s throat. She met him halfway with what looked like a straight punch to the solar plexus, but from the way Hassan stopped in mid-leap Bronstein knew there had been something solid in her hand. As she stepped back and let Hassan fall, Bronstein got a look at what it was; a short length of rebar protruded from low in Hassan’s chest, a dark stain rapidly spreading from it.

  Bronstein guessed that the buried end of the rebar had been hand-sharpened, and his next thought was: We can’t let the Kenny-boys know!

  He stepped forward and clapped a hand over Mama Yolanda’s mouth just as she was drawing air.

  “Hush!” he whispered fiercely. “Get your knife back and hide it. Then we’ve got to hide the body. We can’t let the Kenny-boys know we’ve got weapons!”

  Mama Yolanda paused for a long moment, caught between her normal impulse to bellow righteously, and the common sense of Bronstein’s warning. Common sense won. Grumbling quietly, she bent down and yanked the rebar out of Hassan’s chest. He fell forward with a faint sigh.

  Bronstein wondered if the man was completely dead yet, even as he ran his hands over the body, searching for anything stolen. Oh yes, there were plundered clownfruit in his pockets, but nothing else, thank whatever gods there were. Mama Yolanda, still bent over and grumbling, wiped the blade of what was now revealed as a crude knife on the ground, muttering about bloodstains rusting iron. Bronstein retrieved his stolen fruit, picked up Hassan’s ankles and whispered: “Can we get him to the river without anyone seeing?”

  “Sure ‘nuff. Just go behind the huts,” Yolanda said, grabbing Hassan’s arms.

  It took them twenty minutes of clumsy work to get the body down to the riverbank, near the ford. Bronstein was sure that somebody had seen them, but there was no sound or sight of anyone. Certainly nobody came to interfere as they shoved the corpse into the river and pushed it out into the current. As the body began to drift, the water stirred and splashed around it. For one heart-stopping second Bronstein thought Hassan was still alive, but then he noticed the small slick bodies darting and thrashing around the corpse, and realized that no, it was just some fierce river creatures attracted by the blood.

  Were they fish? Amphibians? Lizards? No matter: they’d eat any animal that got into their territory. It appeared they lurked around the ford, probably waiting for large animals to cross. That was something to keep in mind.

  “Somebody must have seen,” Bronstein muttered as they walked back toward the main tent. “Word will eventually get around.”

  “Why should it?” Yolanda sneered. “Nobody loved him, not even them other Arabs, and they all in lockup.”

  “They’ll probably assume that he’s hiding out in the woods somewhere, waiting for the day he’ll return to lead The Faithful…” Bronstein shook his head. “But he won’t be there to drive them into any more stupid stunts. We’ve got a breather, at least.”

  “What we gon’ do with it?”

  “Build!” Bronstein hissed. “Make food gardens, dig ore, smelt metal and make tools, make our own housing. We can’t move against Kennicott until we can live without them.”

  “Uh-uh.” She gave him a thoughtful look. “Til we don’ need them, but they need us?”

  “Right.” He glanced skyward. “And even that won’t last. They’ll bring in more deportees, soon enough. We’ll have to be able to absorb them, too.”

  “You ain’t just organizin’ for a strike, is you?”

  “No. Much more than that.”

  At that point they’d reached Bronstein’s hut. He gave Mama Yolanda a curt good night and slipped inside.

  Sure enough, his bedroll had been turned inside out and tossed aside. His duffelbag had been emptied on the floor and the contents scattered. Even his spare shoes were tossed in opposite directions, but Bronstein knew where they’d stood. He pulled the multi-tool out of his pocket, opened the widest blade and dug down through the hard-packed clay soil until his fingers encountered the undisturbed plastic slab. He smiled as he dug it out and set it aside, then pulled up the plastic-wrapped notebook computer. One touch of the power-button and its lights glowed, undiminished, faintly illuminating the keyboard. Bronstein laughed softly and began to type.

  *

  *

  *

  Two hundred and sixty-one days after Hassan’s disappearance, at the beginning of first shift, a cluster of expressionless miners stood in front of the guard-shack door and made a simple statement: “We’re on strike. We don’t work until our list of demands is met.” One of them shoved an incised clay tablet at the astonished guard, and then the lot of them turned and walked away.

  The astounded guards looked at the clay tablet and saw the clearly written list:

  1) Workers shall be paid in real metal coins—gold, silver, copper or iron—and not company credits.

  2) The company store shall provide real food, real medicines, real tools and electronics as well as cloth goods.

  3) Existing hours of work shall be maintained.

  4) Workers’ housing shall be provided with clean water, sewage services and electricity.

  The senior guard got on the radio to headquarters. Twenty minutes later, the whole guard contingent, armed with stun-rifles, marched into the main tent with orders to deactivate the food-dispenser while announcing: “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.”

  But nobody was inside
. The tent was completely empty.

  The guards duly deactivated the dispenser. They opened the cabinet and it was cleaned out. They quickly returned to the guard shack’s radio to ask for further instructions.

  Half an hour later they stormed the huts, yanking open doors and firing inside, then looking to see whom they’d hit.

  The huts, too, were empty.

  Back to the radio went the guards, and a long hour of chatter went back and forth to Kennicott headquarters. The guards duly searched the forest, as far as they dared among the alien plants and animals—which, rumor said, had carried off a few miners already—and found nobody. One guard noticed what appeared to have been a vegetable garden, but there was nothing in it now. Another found the remains of a large fire-pit, but even its ashes were gone. All they rousted was a large and angry land gator, which took several shots to stun completely. They returned shaken and subdued.

  More chatter with headquarters made it clear that the mining operations just couldn’t stand idle until the next shipment of deportees came in, and there weren’t enough guards to run the equipment by themselves. Management dithered over how to negotiate with the strikers when they couldn’t be found.

  The conclusion was to take the loudspeaker out of the tent, aim it generally at the forest, and broadcast a prepared statement at maximum volume.

  It was a fine speech, artfully crafted by the company’s psychologists, spoken by a voice carefully tuned to sound kindly, fatherly and authoritative. It spoke first of bewilderment that the miners should be so impatient; didn’t they know that this was a raw new world, where everything had to be imported for a year’s journey or else carved out of the wilderness? And hadn’t the company set them first to making housing of their own? Didn’t they know that Kennicott Metals had their best interests at heart, and was doing the best it could under these trying circumstances? And didn’t they understand that the company too was hurting, having lost a valuable military contract just as its stocks had taken a 1.3% dip in the market? They all had to pull together, in a partnership, seeing that they really were all in the same boat.…

  At the edge of the forest, Jablonski sneered as he checked the threads that bound a note around an arrow. Then he set the arrow in his handmade crossbow and aimed it at the mouth of the loudspeaker. He fired and watched while the arrow soared.

  The speech cut off in a squawk as the arrow hit it dead center. Jablonski chuckled, then turned and faded back into the forest.

  *

  *

  *

  Half a kilometer away, in the largest of a series of interconnecting caves, the organizing committee sat around a large wood fire and discussed the immediate future.

  “So they’ll get the note,” Lucinda was saying, “And they’ll start stringing wires to the huts where we can see them. How will we know the wires aren’t dummies, and the display isn’t a trap?”

  “We send a delegation,” Marian answered, her hands not missing a stitch with her crochet needle. “Probably three of the Latino boys from the west cave, who don’t know where the main caves are and can’t tell it. They go and look, and we tell them what to look for. If they don’t come back, we go right on with the strike. We also watch to see if they’re followed, and if so, we catch the followers and pump them for info. Either way, we don’t come back until all the demands are met.”

  “How long you think they gonna hold out?” Mama Yolanda grumbled, snatching a toddler away from the fire. “Our food gonna run low in… What, two hundred days?”

  “They’ll give in before that. Every day that the machines stand idle, Kennicott loses millions,” said Bronstein, hands steadily sharpening the edge of a crude-cast chisel. “To them, that’s like a bleeding wound that doesn’t heal. They’ll pay, for all their howling. It’s cheaper to give us what we want than to lose that income.”

  “I not understand,” said Rajna, huddled close to the fire in his layers of clothes and blankets. “Why do Kennicott think we be like machines, that they can run cheap?”

  “Corruptions of power,” Bronstein shrugged, setting down the chisel and stone. “The problem with greed is that it makes people stupid: stupid enough to see only the goodies in front of them, not all the related effects to either side.” He reached under his coat to a pocket on his innermost shirt, feeling for the little booklet he’d carried all this time, and all this way. “Folks, it’s about time we gave our bunch a name, and connected it to the patterns of history. You know we’re not the first, not by a long shot, to face exactly this kind of crap and find the same solution.”

  “Say the words,” Marian grinned, recognizing the booklet he pulled out and opened in the light.

  “Right. From this moment on, we’re the Haven Miners’ Local of the Industrial Workers of the Worlds. Now: ‘Preamble to the Constitution’.

  “‘The working class and the employing class have nothing in common…’” He paused, and grinned. “Well, actually, they do have one thing in common; they both want all of the pie.”

  “But who better deserves to have it?” Marion countered, smiling back. “They that actually do the work, or they that give the orders?” With that, she held up what she’d been working on: a child’s shirt, knitted from hand-spun egg-tree fiber with a handmade crochet hook.

  The others looked, and understood, and laughed.

  “They like to think they’re the brains, and we’re only the muscle,” Lucinda cackled, flipping one of her blades from hand to hand. “They forget we’ve got brains, and they don’t have much muscle.”

  “I’d like to see any of the Kennicott managers, “glowered History-Man, “Dumped here the way we were, do half as well.”

  Bronstein picked up his handmade chisel again and studied the edge. “‘Nothing in common’,” he repeated. “Nothing of mind, or skills, or attitude. Nothing at all.”

  — 7 —

  HELL’S-A-COMIN’

  John F. Carr

  2045 A.D., Cat’s Eye Orbit

  High above Haven in orbit around Cat’s Eye, aboard the Kennicott Company ship, Lucky Strike, Mining Officer Martin Peltz sat with Director Ronald Waddell, officer in charge of Haven Mining Operations. They were watching the satellite feed of the latest demands from the striking miners at Kennicott Camp #2. The strikers were poorly dressed and unkempt. They looked like a bunch of starving refugees from a forgotten war back on Earth.

  Director Waddell was a small fussy man with a Van Dyke beard and unframed round glasses, an affectation that irritated the hell out of Martin Peltz. With today’s medical technology, no one had to wear glasses anymore unless they were trying to make a statement: Waddell’s appeared to be, “I’m a fastidious little prick.”

  Martin Peltz, on the other hand, was broad-shouldered and almost twice the size of the Director and was dressed in off-world cammies. He had started out on ground floor as a miner and through hard work and a native ability to impress his superiors had advanced upward through the corporate ranks. There weren’t many self-made men at Kennicott Towers, but he had worked as Stephen DeSilva’s assistant when the DeSilva scion first joined the firm. Now, although Director Waddell was unaware of it, Martin was DeSilva’s off-world troubleshooter. He had just spaced in from Tanith to determine what the problem was that was holding up the hafnium shipments from their delivery to Tabletop.

  He quickly ran through what he knew of the colony’s short history. The moon had been discovered by a CoDo survey ship, and like many such craft it had included a spy in the pay of the Company. When Garner “Bill” Castell managed to wrangle ownership of Haven from the MIT/Cal Tech University Consortium, Kennicott had made a secret deal with the charismatic Harmony founder. In exchange for certain mining rights, they helped pay off Castell’s “good faith payments” to the survey team and agreed to help finance a ship to transport his parishioners to Haven.

  What Kennicott Metals didn’t know at the time was that Castell was as tricky as a card-sharp in Tabletop bordello. Not only had Garner Castell m
ade some kind of accord with the CD Bureau of Intelligence, but he had also leased certain mining rights to both Anaconda Mining and Dover Mineral Development. The deal was they were to provide the colony with building materials, livestock, foodstuffs and basic supplies. In his own inimitable way, Old Man Castell had provided for the future, but had never bothered to inform his son Charles, and soon to be inheritor, about these agreements.

  Charles Castell was not half the man his father was, but he did honor his and his father’s word. However, that did not mean he liked his father’s deals and was known to call them “compacts with the forces of chaos.” Although in truth, from a quick reading of how inhospitable the moon really was, it was obvious to Martin that without the drop shipments of supplies from the other mining companies which had arrived in the colony’s third and fifth year there would be no colony nor Castell City—no matter how humble.

  Kennicott survey teams had arrived on Haven shortly before the Harmonies and they had quickly located several spectacular motherlodes of hafnium. However, Old Garner had included a codicil that forbade the Company from opening any mining operation closer than a thousand kilometers from the Harmony center in all directions. It was Old Man Castell’s attempt, from beyond the grave, to keep the miners and the bottom feeders that followed the mining camps as far away as possible from his people. This codicil forced Kennicott to locate their mines a long way from Castell City, what passed as Haven’s civilized center.

  However, as these things are wont to do, it didn’t work out quite the way the Harmony Founder had planned. To keep the miners and survey teams entertained, Kennicott had been forced to subsidize the building of steamships so that the miners and company guards could visit Castell City and find the accommodations that made them comfortable. The boat trips were long and tedious, but cost Kennicott little. Shipping the miners back and forth by shuttle was not only ridiculously expensive, but prohibited by Castell’s agreement. Still, despite Garner’s foresight, the town was dirt poor and dependent upon the miners and their parasites—the brothels, gambling dens and bars.